Millennials (people born 1980-2000) are often condemned as overconfident, narcissistic, entitled and lazy. Whereas some of that might be true about millennials they are also fearless, optimistic and extremely adaptive.

In his controversial article “The Me Me Me generation” in Times MagazineJoel Stein is introduces his thoughts about millennials and argues that even though they have “higher rates of narcissism, materialism and technology addiction” they will “save us all”. And I think they will if they will use Service Thinking and will set their minds to build a Smarter Planet.

According to J. Spohrer and P.Maglio Service Thinking is a trans-disciplinary approach to study, improve create, scale and innovate in service. If you would think of service as value co-creation that results from communication, planning and other purposeful and knowledge-intensive interactions between distinct service system entities then Service Thinking is a a systematic search for approaches that can help to understand and improve all kinds of value co-creation.

Imagine how much can be achieved if the generation who challenges convention and finds new and better ways of doing things sets their minds to transform their enterprises through analytics, actionable business architecture, mobile technology and social business.

Millennials are creating the next wave of successful companies because they are technologically savvy and they are extremely well connected through the Social Networks. According to Gary Swart the CEO of ODesk, millennials are the “less-owning generation, in that they care more about access to ownership than ownership itself. They do more with owning less expanding “as-a-Service” businesses.

Pinterest, Instagram, Dropbox, Airbnb, Facebook, Groupon, Tumblr are examples of the companies founded by millennials who saw a need to improve Service, co-create and integrate resources. Whether you think that millennials are great entrepreneurs or self-centered narcissists you have to admit that they think through Service Thinking lens and they will change the world.

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